Saturday, 11 April 2015

Hush, Hush.... The return of Tess Monaghan

Laura Lippman is the multiple award-winning best-selling
author of (currently) twelve books in the acclaimed private investigator Tess
Monaghan series and eight New York Times bestselling standalone novels. Her
most recent book published in the UK and the US is Hush Hush. She has won numerous awards for her writing
including the Anthony, Edgar®, Shamus, Macavity, Nero, Barry and Agatha
Awards to name a few! Her books are published all over the world to great
acclaim.With the return of Tess
Monaghan in her latest novel Hush Hush,
Laura Lippman writes about her return and how she dealt with writing about her
now that she is a mother.

Tess Monaghan has had a permanent place in my brain since 1992,
maybe earlier. The novel that would become my first novel lodged into my head
on a sleety November night. A year later, caught in a five-hour delay on a
cross-country trip from Baltimore to San Francisco, I began scribbling in a
black-and-white composition book about a young woman who — scribbled in a
black-and-white composition book. Tess Monaghan, who believed that the autumn
was the true beginning of the year, recorded her annual resolutions in early
September.

Bench press 120 pounds.

Run a 7-minute
mile.

Read Don Quixtote

Find a job, etc.

More than twenty years and 12 books later, Tess has done all of
those things. She has not only found a job, but also opened her own business.
She has had a baby, entered into a stable relationship. Her business is solid
enough that she can afford to have a partner on her payroll and can generally
pick-and-choose among potential jobs. She does divorce work only when
financially pressed. She continues to have a nonstop supply of idiosyncratic
opinions. (Driving manual transmission is superior, for example.) She is, in
short, the most satisfactory imaginary friend that a grown-up could ever
have.

And yet we were apart for most of six years because I didn’t have a
clue how to write about her once she had a child.

There is no formula for the crime novel — how I wish there were! —
but there are reasonable expectations. One of those expectations is that there
will be suspense, presumably involving the main character. It has been
challenging enough, over the years, to respect Tess’s intelligence and the
reader’s desire for thrills. I have tried hard to avoid the plot device that my
friend Lauren Milne Henderson has described as: “What’s that terrible noise? Let me put on my filmy negligee and
marabou-trimmed mules and investigate!”

But it seemed to me, who became a mother two years after Tess did,
that a mother would be particularly vigilant about her safety. And if she were
not, neither the reader nor I could forgive her. I had read so many reader
reviews in which betrayed fans of longtime series proclaimed that they “threw a book against a wall.” I hated
the image of my book bouncing off walls.

Every January, I teach in an 8-day writers workshop. Over a decade,
I have found myself

telling my students that no one can write around a problem.
There is no amount of style or technique or language that can paper over plot
hotels. Characters must be consistent to their characters. And I tell them that
when they find themselves trying to write around problems, maybe they should
run straight at them.

So I took my own advice. The problem was that Tess was a mother?
Then run right at that subject. Write about motherhood across a broad spectrum,
from the most quotidian problems (a tantrum in a grocery store) to the true
worst-case scenario (“I killed my child.”)

Of course, the problem remains. Tess is still a mother. I still have
to find ways to provide suspense without making Tess stupid or foolhardy. Where
does she go from here? I have no idea. The only thing I know for sure is that
we are not done, Tess and I. Yet — Tess deserves a proper ending, a planned
ending. She also deserves a break. Because when I am around, life is not so
good for Tess. That’s the final irony. I make life absolute hell for my
imaginary BFF. Eventually, it has to end. Doesn’t it?

More information about Laura Lippman and her books can be found on
her website.You can also find her on Facebook.